Maybe it was the spring air, but this theme of love also felt deeply woven into the conference and was brought into focus by Ash Hanson, founder of the Department of Public Transformation. Ash’s keynote focused on the question of how to turn rural communities into seductive places — what draws you in? What gets your heart beating? What makes you fall in love with a town? And she had a message: it is the role of artists to cultivate this allure. In other words, support for the arts is essential for responding to the challenges faced by rural communities: “The arts aren’t the cherry on top of the ice cream, they are the sugar in the cream,” Hanson said. But it also takes courage to fall in love with a place, because places, like people, are vulnerable to destruction.

And this is what our last keynote presentation challenged us to consider. A collective presentation by Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR), based in western North Carolina, the speakers shared their experience of organizing before, during, and after the devastating floods brought by Hurricane Helene nearly a year ago. ROAR took us into the depths of how communities respond when the places they love have been suddenly unmade, and how people manage to create new and deeper bonds in the shared vulnerability this reveals.

ROAR’s organizing is worth spelling out more, because it is rooted in a framework of community-based mutual aid that minimizes institutionalization. They are not even a 501c3 non-profit. Their work is based on building relations of trust and cooperation between neighbors, and prior to Helene, had taken the form of organizing firewood chopping and distribution. But it was groups like theirs that were best positioned during the flooding to check in on people, identify needs, and distribute resources through the hills of their region. They note that larger entities had capabilities that were useful as well, and at its best, the disaster response involved a collaboration at these different scales. But their work is a great reminder that the intimate and neighborhood levels of organizing can be decisive in moments of disaster.

Their talk offered both a serious example of how rural communities can begin preparing for an unpredictable climate, offered hope that our best selves can shine forward in the shared experience of disasters, and raised difficult questions about the power dynamics that are revealed by these moments and their aftermath. They shared a story about public bathrooms and wash stations that had been built in Asheville for the many people displaced by flooding, and how, when city leaders declared the disaster to be “over,” there were still many houseless people who lost access to this vital resource.
Who gets to determine when the disaster is over? Who gets to determine the disaster’s real shape, or even when it began? These are questions that the concept of “community resilience” invites, but which demand something like courage, and something like love, and something like conferences — times outside of time, spent thinking and building experiences together — to even begin to answer.

Watch keynotes and special sessions from the 2025 IU Rural Conference

1For a study on remission of alcohol use after treatment: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7960734/; for the higher side of these numbers, finding 40-60% success, see https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/treatment-recovery.